K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

Mint vs. LMDE: Sudden weight gain

I’ve only had this Celeron M for about a week now, but I’ve already put four different distros on it, eradicated half of those again, reconfigured, tweaked and wiggled it so many times I almost lost track.

Now it is living out its existence as a remote media player. And it seems well suited to the task.🙂

> It does beg the question though, at least from my point
> of view: What’s the advantage in using the Ubuntu
> rendition, if LMDE comes in lighter at the startup?
> And is, presumably, lighter throughout … ?

I’ve wondered that as well, for years now, but people seem to be stuck on *buntu for whoknowswhat reasons. Marketing is part of it, and the default packages and closed drivers is another part I am sure.

I was evaluating Crunchbang “Statler” which is based on Debian Testing. My system uses an Nvidia video card and I use the proprietary driver. When Crunchbang did a kernel upgrade and I rebooted I was dumped to the command line. If I was less computer literate, I would need to figure out what is wrong.

“buntu” handles this upgrade scenario without user interaction. I can get a kernel upgrade, reboot, and get back to work. Debian could choose to do the simple proprietary video driver reinstall but doesn’t.

I actually Wrote about this a few days ago on my personal blog perhaps you saw the article or you were just in a common mind set. Anyway I just thought that was a little amusing.

Some might say that Debian is purer than Ubuntu, but I disagree, As I said in my article Ubuntu was almost assured to evolve faster than Debian because it facilitated a new release every six months. Thus the expected inovation is significantly higher over a two year period than for Debian.

As for another idea have you played with LibreOffice? Their are alot of people writing about it, or rather reposting an install guide, but what do you think of it. It seems to be a little more polished but beware its a pain to get back on OpenOffice.